The 12 year-olds-birthday party




When children in the Netherlands are 12 year’s old, they have to make a test that determines which educational route they get to follow. The route that you follow, decides a lot for the opportunities you get to take on later in life, as well as housing, insurance and the people you surround yourself with. When I made this test, I got Havo advice, but my teacher adviced me to go to Mavo, because of my difficulty with math. My parents, both highly educated, conviced my teacher to send me to Havo and I proved my parents that I could handle this level. From the age of 12, I learned that a practical education was something they wouldn’t approve of and but I’m not the only one.  The educational system in the Netherlands causes inequal social hierarchies that extend as we mature. This is not just the case for people that go to Mavo but it’s something that extends to other routes aswell. When I talked about this subject with a friend that went to a University, he said that he actually has no-one in their friend circle that went to college to which I asked, but I went to a University of Applied Sciences. Apparently he does not view this level as college and I have many more examples that paint a picture of the mulitiplicity of this problem. What I think is the biggest shame, is that through deviding students across different levels, we are forced in certain social bubbles which actually increases the social hierarchies and perceptions of people that went to different routes. This is what I play into with this design. Through getting people from different educational backgrounds together, we get to re-learn that an educational level doesn’t define the worth of a person. 


Getting people from different social backgrounds togehter without enforcing social hierarchies proved to be quite difficult. That’s why I based my design on a philosophy by Martin Buber, a social Scientist who’se research involves equality and dialogue. Buber states that in order to create equal perceptions, it’s important to view each other separate from our categories, in this case educational levels. His philosophy gets supported through a case study by Non-profit organisation: Braver’s angels, who designed a framework to get republicans and democrats together without it inciting a quarrel. By instructing them to first bond over mundane things instead of political preference, it actually created af framework that allowed them to view each other as humans instead of for their categories: republicans and democrats. This is a very important insight I took into the design of my graduation project: in order to get people from different educational backgrounds together without enforcing hierarchies, I first had to let them bond through more mundane things, to make them view each other as equals. 

Because dialogue was difficult to manouvre in terms of re-directing the beliefs that Dutch children are taught to be true, I chose to use games as a method for bonding. These games gradually increase by the interaction that’s needed. Within these games, the most important factor was not allowing people to perform better than others, which defies the goal of the whole project. I based the games on games I used to play at parties but flipped them, to enforce collaboration through designing them in such a way that’s it’s not possible to finish the game on solitary efforts, as well as not allowing for the possibility of one person to lose the game; such as with jenga. I would love to explain the adaptations more in depth, but will leave that for the questions, if you are interested in it.